Virginia Commonwealth University's C. Kenneth and Dianne Wright Center for Clinical and Translational Research has allocated $100,000 in translational-science pilot grants, dividing the sum equally — $25,000 per project — among four interdisciplinary teams whose work targets research bottlenecks rather than any single disease.

The pool sits under a $27 million Clinical and Translational Science Award (CTSA) from the National Institutes of Health that the Wright Center holds. NIH renewed that underlying grant in March 2023.

What does "translational science" buy that disease-specific grants don't?

Standard research funding rewards studies tied to a defined condition. The Wright Center's 2026 pilots instead fund methods, datasets, and tools that downstream investigators can reuse across hepatology, cardiology, psychiatry, pulmonary medicine, and other fields.

"The purpose of these awards is to improve the translational process," said F. Gerard Moeller, M.D., the center's director. "By identifying and overcoming the scientific and operational hurdles — or bottlenecks — that slow down research, we aren't just supporting four studies; we are developing a more effective framework for all future medical research at VCU and beyond."

Which teams received funding, and what bottlenecks do they target?

Juan Pablo Arab, M.D., and Ekaterina Smirnova, Ph.D. — Wearable biosensors for alcohol-use detection. Arab (School of Medicine) and Smirnova (School of Public Health) will pair wearable biosensors with phosphatidylethanol (PEth), a direct ethanol metabolite measured in blood, to verify heavy-drinking episodes outside clinical visits. Arab also serves as inaugural director of alcohol sciences at the Stravitz-Sanyal Institute for Liver Disease and Metabolic Health.

"This project addresses a major translational bottleneck in alcohol-associated liver disease: our inability to accurately measure alcohol use in patients' real-world environments," Arab said. The pair aim to replace self-reporting with continuous, biomarker-validated monitoring in hepatology trials.

Na Bo, Ph.D. — Statistical and AI methods for treatment heterogeneity. Bo, an assistant professor in the School of Public Health, is building computational tools that estimate how individual patients — not population averages — respond to therapy in survival data. "This research project focuses on developing novel statistical methods and clinician-facing computational tools to characterize heterogeneous treatment effects in survival data," Bo said. Bo flagged applicability in cardiology, pulmonary medicine, psychiatry, and hepatology for targeted-therapy decisions.

Erin Britton, Ph.D. — A training platform for the Virginia All-Payer Claims Database. Britton (School of Public Health) will construct a synthetic replica of the state's All-Payer Claims Database (APCD) — high-fidelity enough to teach claims analysis without exposing protected patient records. "To accelerate translational research and support evidence-based healthcare policy around things like tobacco use and insurance coverage for doula care, we need to combine rigorous study designs with real-world data; and building that expertise requires practice," Britton said.

Karen Chartier, Ph.D., and Ananda Amstadter, Ph.D. — Genotyping across ancestral populations. Chartier (School of Social Work) and Amstadter (School of Medicine) will upgrade genotyping on the Spit for Science registry, which has enrolled more than 15,000 participants, to detect rare variants across the ancestry continuum. The upgrade targets a documented gap: medical tools trained largely on European-ancestry cohorts often underperform in other populations.

What constraints should R&D managers track?

Each $25,000 pilot supports feasibility work: small validation studies for the wearable-biosensor pipeline, computational prototyping for Bo's survival models, synthetic-data construction for the APCD training platform, and genotyping-protocol upgrades on Spit for Science. None of the four project descriptions disclosed target sample sizes, timelines for validated outputs, or follow-on funding sources. Smirnova's statistical expertise, the 15,000-participant Spit for Science registry, and Britton's synthetic-data approach all seed reusable infrastructure that competing investigators can adopt — yet quantifiable deliverables will require larger follow-on awards.

The Wright Center has not announced a date for the next call, though its $27 million NIH CTSA umbrella covers ongoing pilot administration, leaving the annual cycle intact for 2027 applicants.